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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

Archibald MacLeish

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Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Atheism
Demand
Authority
Infantile
Time
Cowardice
Pattern
External
Demands
Patterns

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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
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The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Archibald MacLeish
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Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
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Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
Archibald MacLeish
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There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
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The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
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How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.
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Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.
Archibald MacLeish
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
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What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
Archibald MacLeish
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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
Archibald MacLeish
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
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Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them new and born and fresh and wonderful.
Archibald MacLeish
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The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
Archibald MacLeish